Getting your questions ready
Getting your questions ready
Beat the crowd
10 questions No timer
60 free Ebola trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Ebola trivia quiz covers the disease from the laboratory to the headlines. The science questions ask how the virus is built and how it spreads: the filament shape, the fruit bats thought to be its reservoir, the six known ebolaviruses and the four that make people sick, the incubation window, the fatality range, and the immune tricks that let it run so fast. The history questions go back to the two 1976 outbreaks in Sudan and Zaire, the river that gave the disease its name, and the scientists who identified it. From there it moves through the West African epidemic of 2013-16 (the child in Meliandou, the numbers, the cases in Dallas, Madrid, New York and Glasgow, Time's Person of the Year), the Reston monkey-house scare that inspired The Hot Zone, the Kivu outbreak in a war zone, and the vaccine and antibody treatments that finally changed the odds. Difficulty runs from easy to expert and is shown on every question. Every answer was checked against a reference page and each question carries its citation. For related topics, try our Pandemics, Human Body and Medicine quizzes.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Ebola is named after a river in which present-day country?
Democratic Republic of the Congo
The 1976 Yambuku outbreak happened near the Ebola River in what was then Zaire.
Q 02Which animals are believed to be the natural host of ebolaviruses?
Fruit bats
They can carry and spread the virus without getting sick; three species of fruit bat were found to be likely carriers.
Q 03How many known ebolaviruses are there, and how many of them are dangerous to humans?
Six and four
Reston and Bombali viruses are the two not thought to make people ill.
Q 04Ebola outbreaks have had death rates between 25% and 90%; roughly what is the average?
50%
Which virus is involved and how quickly treatment starts make a big difference to the odds.
Q 05What is Ebola's maximum incubation period, the standard monitoring window for contacts?
21 days
Symptoms usually appear within 4 to 10 days; models suggest around 5% of cases may take longer than three weeks.
Q 06How does Ebola spread between people?
Direct contact with body fluids
There are no documented cases of airborne spread between humans, and no spread by insects has been reported.
Q 07Ebola virions are filamentous particles that may appear in the shape of what?
A shepherd's crook
They can also look like a 'U' or a '6', and may be coiled or branched; particles are 80 nanometres wide but up to 14,000 long.
Q 08How many genes does an ebolavirus genome contain?
Seven
The genome is single-stranded RNA and codes for seven structural proteins including the glycoprotein spike that lets it enter cells.
Q 09Ebolaviruses are most closely related to which other family of haemorrhagic fever viruses?
Marburgviruses
The 1976 samples were initially thought to be a new strain of Marburg virus before being recognised as something new.
Q 10Which ebolavirus is considered the most dangerous and responsible for the most outbreaks?
Zaire virus
It caused the 1976 Yambuku outbreak, the West African epidemic and the Kivu epidemic.
Q 11Which two ebolaviruses are not thought to cause disease in humans?
Reston and Bombali
Both have caused disease in other primates, and Reston virus can also infect pigs.
Q 12Which two of Ebola's structural proteins play the key role in blocking the body's interferon response?
VP24 and VP35
VP24 stops the STAT1 signal reaching the nucleus and VP35 directly inhibits interferon-beta, letting the virus race ahead of the immune system.
Q 13Which type of immune cell is the first to be infected by Ebola virus?
Macrophages
The infection triggers programmed cell death and carries the virus to nearby lymph nodes.
Q 21The 1976 Sudan outbreak began with a storekeeper at a factory in the town of Nzara that processed what?
Cotton
That first case was hospitalised on 30 June and died on 6 July; the outbreak went unrecognised until the Zaire cases some months later.
Q 22The prototype Ebola virus variant 'Mayinga' is named after whom?
A nurse who died in the 1976 Zaire outbreak
Mayinga N'Seka's name lives on in the lab strain, and Tom Clancy borrowed it for the airborne 'Ebola Mayinga' of his novel Executive Orders.
Q 23The 2003 DRC outbreak set the record for the highest Ebola death rate. What was it?
90%
Q 14For how long can Ebola virus persist in the semen of a male survivor?
More than three months
Survivors are advised to use condoms for at least a year or until two negative tests, and the virus was found in one man's eye two months after his blood was clear.
Q 15In the worst-hit West African country in 2014, what share of Ebola infections came from burial rituals?
69%
Dead bodies remain infectious, which is why safe burial teams became a central part of every response.
Q 16Which farm animal can transmit Ebola to primates without contact, as the virus concentrates in its lungs?
Pigs
Humans and other primates carry the virus mainly in their blood, not their lungs, which is why airborne spread between people has not been seen.
Q 17The first case of the 1976 Yambuku Ebola outbreak had just returned from a trip near the border of which country?
Central African Republic
Mabalo Lokela had visited the Ebola River on that trip; he was first treated for malaria with quinine and died 14 days after his symptoms began.
Q 18According to Peter Piot, how did the nuns at Yambuku Mission Hospital inadvertently spread the 1976 outbreak?
Reusing unsterilised needles for vitamin injections
The outbreak lasted 26 days; the quarantine, the locals' precautions and stopping the injections were all credited with ending it.
Q 19Which Congolese doctor took the blood sample from a Belgian nun that Peter Piot used to identify the virus?
Jean-Jacques Muyembe-Tamfum
He is also credited as the first scientist to come into direct contact with the disease and survive.
Q 20What was the fatality rate of the 1976 Zaire outbreak, in which 280 of 318 patients died?
88%
The Sudan outbreak the same year, caused by a different ebolavirus, killed 151 of 284 people.
It infected 143 people and killed 128; by contrast the West African epidemic's fatality rate was around 40%.
Q 24In which country was a new ebolavirus species identified during a 2007 outbreak?
Uganda
Bundibugyo virus was tentatively named after the district; it has caused only one other outbreak, in eastern DRC in 2012.
Q 25How did a Russian scientist die of Ebola in 2004?
She stuck herself with an infected needle
Ebola had earlier been investigated by the Soviet Biopreparat programme for possible weaponisation.
Q 26The 2013-16 West African epidemic was traced to a toddler who died in December 2013 in which country?
Guinea
The boy, later identified as Emile Ouamouno, lived in the village of Meliandou; his mother, sister and grandmother died soon after.
Q 27Roughly how many people were infected in the West African epidemic, the largest ever recorded?
About 28,600
The WHO counted 11,323 deaths as of May 2016 and warned that even those numbers were probably underestimates.
Q 28On what date in 2014 did the WHO declare the West African epidemic an international emergency?
8 August
Its Director-General said the affected countries 'simply do not have the capacity to manage an outbreak of this size and complexity on their own'.
Q 29In 2014 the WHO reported that what share of the epidemic's dead were healthcare workers?
10%
Working closely with patients' body fluids made them especially vulnerable; a later CDC report put Guinean health workers' infection rate at 42 times that of others.
Q 30Whom did Time magazine name Person of the Year for 2014?
The Ebola fighters
Editor Nancy Gibbs praised 'a group of men and women willing to stand and fight'; survivor-turned-nurse Salome Karwah was among the health workers on the covers.